Hello, I am a Linux system administrator working for small and big companies, managing all kind of software, setup and weirdness. I have already done few install like the one you are looking for. The best way to achive your goal will be using a DRBD disk and heartbeat. The primary server will sync his disk to the secondary one. If the first fails, heartbeat will start service on the second and after few seconds of delay, all is again up and running. The advantage of this solution is the lack of "manual sync": all is automatically synched. Having a disk in DRBD is however a big performance loss (I don't know how busy is your server). A More simpler solution will be a multi master mysql setup (but you will have only one server active at time) with email synching as you said. Heartbeat will check for server failure and switch service from one to the other. No problems for the backup. More detail on what is needed via PM. About me, I am 37, italian (GMT+1), ready to work with you.